Ours is an age of busy people, scurrying around to accomplish more at work, at play, and at home. Agendas filled to bursting keep us bustling from one activity to another, always on the run, always a little late.
It is a sign of one’s importance to frequently look at one’s watch, or to always be near a phone. Our public activities – our image and our reputation – consume the better part of our attention and the lion’s share of our energy.
And yet, there is always a price to be paid for the choice of how we spend our time. If we occupy ourselves with too much work, or with too much public service, then the ones who pay the price often are our families and our friends. Absentee fathers, distracted mothers and latch-key children are the silent sufferers in our struggle for attention, prestige, and status. All of us pay a price for our misguided priorities.
Ours is not the first generation to realize that our children and our relationships require more time than we have allotted to them. As is often the case, problems we think are new reverberate across the ages, finding consummate expression in the pages of our holy Torah.
The first father too busy to notice his children is Isaac, and our patriarch pays a heavy price for his public commitments, however laudable they might have been.
At the end of his life, Isaac becomes blind – perhaps the outward sign of his own inability to perceive his children’s needs. As he realizes that his life may be drawing to a close, he instructs his son Esau to bring him a meal of venison, fresh from the hunt, so that he might have the strength to bestow a blessing on his firstborn.
Rebekah hears of her husband’s plan and intervenes to assure that her favorite son, Jacob, receives his father’s blessing instead of Esau. Her ruse is a success, and Isaac bestows his paternal blessing – the brit linking the Jewish people and God – to Jacob, the younger son.
When Esau shows up with the meal, Isaac is horrified to realize that he must have blessed the wrong son. He asks his son, “Who are you?” and Esau exclaims, “I am your son, Esau, your firstborn.” At that point, the Torah recounts, “Isaac was seized with very violent trembling.”
The extremity of Isaac’s response attracted rabbinic attention. Why did he tremble so? The Midrash Bereshit Rabbah records the viewpoint of Rabbi Yohanan: “When a man has two sons, and one goes out and the other comes in, does he tremble? Surely not! The reason, however, was that when Esau went in, Gehinnom (the rabbinic equivalent of hell) went in with him.”
In other words, Esau was such a difficult and troubled boy that disaster followed in his wake. A constant source of worry and aggravation, Esau was a problem child his whole life. His father was quaking, recoiling from his disappointing son.
Another intriguing midrash recounts a similar reason, with one slight variation. Midrash Tanhuma records “when Esau entered, Gehinnom opened for him.” Along that same line, Rashi says that “he saw Gehinnom open beneath him.” This version of the Midrash may refer not to Esau, but to the father Isaac himself. Perhaps it is saying that when he saw the misery of his son, it felt as though Gehinnom itself were opening up underneath him. That bottomless turmoil was the sense of the father, too late, that his own inattention had contributed decisively to his son’s delinquency.
Perhaps if Isaac had taken some of the time he devoted to his public leadership and used it to be a more involved father, his son would have grown in a very different way. It is striking that this conversation between the two of them is their first recorded conversation – and Esau is already an adult!
While Isaac was focusing on tribal matters and issues of religious leadership, his two boys grew up without a father’s care and guidance.
Small wonder then that Isaac felt Gehinnom open up beneath him. Our chance at repairing the world comes only once, through the kind of care, teaching and examples we provide for our children. While they are living with us, while they still turn to us for approval and for instruction, that is the time to erect a legacy, to touch tomorrow.
Time is short. The task is great. And the children are waiting.
Shabbat Shalom.